This episode of Rathole Radio marks something of a landmark for us, our first live guest on the show. We’ve had interviews before but always pre-recorded rather than live. I was privileged to be joined on the phone by American singer/songwriter David Rovics. We had a great long chat, played some records and generally had fun. I also played some eclectic music picks and drew the winner of the competition. So I hope you enjoy the show.

Competition Winner: The winner drawn at random was Ian Folland, an old friend of mine. I feel a bit guilty about that but it was purely random I promise. Ian lives down South now so I’ll have to post the CD off to him ASAP.

16:51 –Special Phone Guest:David Rovics. I was delighted to be joined live on the phone from the States by singer / songwriter David Rovics. I saw David play live supporting Billy Bragg in Liverpool back in May. He’s a great singer and a powerful songwriter who discusses political issues in the best tradition of rebel song. We discussed his new album “Ten Thousand Miles Away”, which was released this month. You can find David’s music on Jamendo, and also at Soundclick.com

David mentioned his book on distributing your own music and singing for you supper. You can find more details on that and buy other bits of merchandise from his online store. David is also currently on a tour of mid-west with Anne Feeney, so I advise you to catch them live if you can. At the time of writing his website has been hacked but you can find tour details here.

Feedback: I read an email from George De Bruin, who actually met David Rovics at a concert in the last week and took some video of the event. I was really pleased too hear that. Thanks George. Thanks also to Ed Fonseca, Mjjzf, Steve, Taiyo Rawle and Liam McCombes for their emails.

I also talked about the new Mixcloud account I created for the show. Please head over there and show your support, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks for listening, I hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks also to everyone who turned up in our IRC channel at irc.freenode.net the channel name is #ratholeradio. I don’t expect much to happen there in the weeks between shows, I probably won’t be around much, but if people want to hang around in there and chat you’re more than welcome. Don’t forget you can access the channel from a web browser by going to webchat.freenode.netand entering #ratholeradio in the channel text box. Take care till next time folks.

Send all feedback and suggestions to – show AT ratholeradio.org

Music Sources and Licensing: A few of the tracks in this show are from the artists own personal websites and don’t contain licensing information. That’s why they are listed as unknown. The individual licenses are listed next to each track, where known. If there is no license listed you must assume all rights are reserved on that song. The rest come from the following sources: